The virtualisation technology it offers is based upon the bare-metal hypervisor ESX/ESXi using a x86 architecture. The hypervisories installed upon the physical servers permits for a several Virtual Machines (VMs) to run on a single server, whilst each VM uses its own operating system.

The company was founded in 1998, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. VMware itself was the creation of Edouard Bugnion, Edward Wang, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine and Diane Greene, who launched the first product, the VMware Workstation, back in 1999.